Unofficial news and tips about Google

December 8, 2012

Google Reader, "Constantly on the Chopping Block"

Buzzfeed has an interesting article about the evolution of Google Reader. While the article mostly focuses on the social features that were removed from Google Reader a few months after Google+ was launched, there are some thought-provoking insights from former Google Reader engineers that reveal why the service has never been a priority for Google and why it can always be discontinued.

"In the beginning, the best word I can use is that Google tolerated the project. Then, they gave it — support is too strong a word. They gave it some thought," said Chris Wetherell, the Googler who started the project. Jenna Bilotta, a former user experience designer at Google, has a slightly different opinion: "Everyone from Google used Reader, from Larry and Sergey to the newest engineers. It's such a beloved project. Still, it was just in this limbo space. It wasn't really supported, but it wasn't actively being harmed."

The difficulty was that Reader users, while hyperengaged with the product, never snowballed into the tens or hundreds of millions. Brian Shih became the product manager for Reader in the fall of 2008. "If Reader were its own startup, it's the kind of company that Google would have bought. Because we were at Google, when you stack it up against some of these products, it's tiny and isn't worth the investment," he said. At one point, Shih remembers, engineers were pulled off Reader to work on OpenSocial, a "half-baked" development platform that never amounted to much. "There was always a political fight internally on keeping people staffed on this little project," he recalled. Someone hung a sign in the Reader offices that said "DAYS SINCE LAST THREAT OF CANCELLATION." The number was almost always zero. At the same time, user growth — while small next to Gmail's hundreds of millions — more than doubled under Shih's tenure. But the "senior types," as Bilotta remembers, "would look at absolute user numbers. They wouldn't look at market saturation. So Reader was constantly on the chopping block."

iGoogle, a much more popular service, will be discontinued next year and Google Reader's infrastructure is used to show feeds in iGoogle. Hopefully, Google Reader will still be available for some time, but it's mostly wishful thinking.

Google is making a common mistake for a big company, they are shutting down small businesses within their company instead of selling them. Just bc it's not as big as USA Today doesn't mean it's not a business for someone who might like to own it. Shutting down iGoogle is just IGNORANT and ASSANINE. Some guy named Fred Hickey makes a nice living selling cheap newsletters. Now Google shouldn't be interested in owning his newsletter bc it's to small. But it shouldn't be shut down simply bc Larry Page can't make a billion running it. As I said, big companies make classic big company mistakes. Sell the biz internally to an interested employee for a dollar and give him 2 years of infrastructure cost in time to get him to break even.

Currents, really? Is that still around? That aside, News is a different product than Reader. I don't use Reader primarily for news, but to keep track of blogs that would never ever make it to the front page of Google News.

This is by far and above the best RSS reader out there. It is pure Google minimalism and high quality. I've tried many other news readers and none come close to the ease of use, simplicity of the UI....

Honestly its hard to see Google monetizing this, so I guess I couldn't blame them if they were to drop it like they did Google Desktop Search. But still, I hope they don't.

If they got rid of Google Reader, and didn't replace it with other RSS subscription capabilities, it would actually reduce my usage of Google+. The vast majority of what I post to G+ originates from stories I read in Google Reader.

I honestly just have too many sites that I like to keep track of. Without a good RSS reader I would be lost, and the fact that my reader is linked to my Google account and subscriptions cross-refresh across all of my devices is just too perfect.

The difficulty with RSS from a monetisation perspective is that it actually strips out advertising from sites and leaves me with the bare updated information. I can see the issues from that perspective.

but damn it.. it's all about ME!I think the service is fantastic...maybe I should start looking at alternative RSS services.

The day Google axes Reader is the day I turn in my Google fan card. I mean it, Reader is awesome and I'm very happy with its current incarnation -- it's nicely integrated into Google+ and uses the current Google design.

Not nicely integrated at all! You can't +1 an item without the bulky share box popping up, and there's no keyboard shortcut key for +1'ing. There used to be an "L" shortcut for liking, and btw, afaik likes weren't converted to +1s. So no, not nicely integrated AT ALL in my opinion. Which is especially bad considering it's their own product!

I have been dreading this day. I feel that it will soon be upon us. My favorite Google product will be shuttered within the next year.

I have been mentally preparing myself. I've decided to just export all of my Reader RSS feeds into Mozilla Thunderbird.

Google+ isn't a good replacement for Reader since most media and news companies neglect it. They all prefer Facebook. Google Currents is seemingly abandoned. No new content producers of note have added their product to the serve. The app itself is rather buggy. You can't see embeded media such as slideshows and non-youtube videos.

Google, don't do it, as Google Reader is one of your best products and I have been using it for a few years now - I would never imagine to use a different RSS feeds aggregator. Please, leave Reader alone.

I have been using Google Reader for several years and if it gets axed then the Mayans were right!It will be the end for me. Google PLEASE DON'T DO IT!

anyways I would love a way to manage my starred items more efficiently as I probably have thousands of articles and would like to go through then and only keep the most important ones butIt can get tedious. Anyone have a suggestion?

It's not been the same since they killed social - G+, for whatever reason, doesn't generate as interesting of comment threads. I also miss using my friends as news curators. It's not out yet, but all you google reader fans should be watching http://hivemined.org/ .

Google caused a massive commotion when they changed the UI a couple years ago. Just a UI change. It was in all the blogs.

Then again last year (or was it 2011?) they removed the integrated sharing and told people to use google+. Again, the internet exploded.

The moral to the story is that people love this product and while it may not have a lot of users compared to gmail (ie, the entire population of the Earth) it did capture nearly 100% of the market, and it's worth keeping around.

Google Reader is absolutely vital product for me. I'm spending most of the time online using it. I read a lot and there's no other way I could track updates across all sources I'm interested in - other than by using an RSS aggregator. And there's no other reader even close to GR in terms of usability/convinience/speed (and I tried many of them).

I can see the reason behind RSS being not that popular in a global sense. I presume the whole concept of RSS (looking for feeds, managing subscriptions etc.) is just too complex for a casual user. At the same time a similar functionality is provided by social networks (news feeds). But I believe there is a number of people - like me - who need to get news just this way:- I want to be sure I will see every update and wont miss anything important just because some fancy relevance algorithm decision- I need to track read and unread items and be able to mark items read/unread/starred- I am more of a reader and rarely want to share anything really- I don't care that much about boring everyday updates of my not-so-close friends in social networks compared to some really interesting articles I get in my feeds. At least, I want these things to be separated

And compared to other RSS readers GR is just exactly what I want. I love the way navigation is organized, love clean, simple and content-oriented design. I absolutely love keyboard shortcuts and ability to go through all my feeds without touching a mouse/touchpad. The labels system works exactly how it should.

It would be a disaster if Google discontinues GR. I would agree to have it as a payed service or to see as much ads as needed - just to be able to use as I did last few years.

I love Reader and would hate to see it go. But at the same time it's obvious that Google have not been paying enough attention to it. :(While searching for suitable alternatives, NewsBlur looks like it could be viable..But the search continues...

I am a heavy web user and still more than half of my time is spent in Reader. I still dearly miss the "Note in Reader" removed in latest major release, when Google+ had a big push.Please try to spin Reader off, or release the source code, if the day came to cut support.

Google Reader is the product which I use the most. I am an avid reader and Google Reader helps me keep updated with all the articles. Even if I miss some day I catch up on some articles over the weekend. I have it on my Android Tablet and my Android Phone. I can't live without it. Please Google don't kill this product.

For me the internet is about ideas and great writers that I follow. They are better "friends" than some local yokels on facebook. Reader with the great "Super Full Feeds" extension is an efficient way to absorb info. Google dumping Reader would be par for the course to the crappy company they are becoming. They, like Microsoft before them, now only resort to creating derivative products using their heft to steal market share. The sickingly commercial "play" store, the confusing and unusable google+ which is probably the only thing that ever made facebook seem good. Their browser, which offered a couple of decent original ideas early on is now is now being totally outdone by Firefox. Just the other day I marked an email from Google as spam in gmail. Google do something original!

Just like many of the other commenters here, I got to this article from Google Reader. I use it every day whether I am at work, at home, or anywhere else. Honestly it is the one of the only products really keeping me using google. I love duckduckgo as a search engine, iOS isn't terrible and I would probably give windows phone 7/8 a go, Opera and Firefox are easy replacements for chrome, and there are at least 12 free hotmail services out there comparable to gmail. In reality there are only two things keeping me loyal to Google, my love of Android and my love of Reader. My phones contract is over in the summer and I am considering getting a Windows phone, so what is keeping me with Google? Reader.

Google Reader is a unique service that stands for its own, and must not be merged with other services, nor discontinued.I hope you all know that with GR you not just collect RSS feeds from websites and blog you consume information from, but rather get RSS feeds of words, and phrases by combing Bing search engine and Google Reader - to get RSS of a Subject.You are invited to read my piece on that here: http://bit.ly/fAIZGw.I hope yoy will understand that it cannot be done with other tool or service.More tips in favor of GR, here: http://bit.ly/KT3Vn2.Google, please don't "Mark all as read...!"

It seems to me that 90% of Google's products wander into this kind of limbo. If you look at the really big bugs that just linger for years with dozens of forum threads, plus the less than polite comments of Google engineers on bug reports, you see all the usual signs of an organisation of a company that has substituted brownian motion for forward progress.

I would be deeply upset if Google reader was discontinued. I love the fact i can read from any of my many devices or PCs and everything is kept in sync. I don't know of any other product that does this. please give this product support

Being self-hosted is a bit of a problem, actually: most people don't keep servers of their own to install this. Say what you want about cloud apps, but they typically have better backup policies than I do on my local machines. I'd rather have the backend of the products I use be managed elsewhere.

Noooo, there's no alternative for Reader now. Simple and most readible than sites with many unnecessary images. Please, stop thinking about close this project! Ask us - can we pay for this, but don't close, ok?

I am a massive Google fanboy but if they get rid of Google Reader, well, I'll still be a fanboy but I'll be mighty annoyed :) I use Google Reader constantly for news and blogs, plus I use the starred feature to populate my image inspiration blog on Tumblr http://renduh.tumblr.com/Don't do it Google!

I'd be pretty devastated if Google Reader was discontinued. I've used it for years now and outside of Gmail and Voice, it's my most used service, easily. Does it cost that much money to stay up and running? Perhaps they could add inline ads into the interface somehow to justify keeping it. I've tried other RSS readers and none of them are simple and user-friendly as Google Reader, plus, by extension, I support Gmail and Google + every time I share a story to those services via Reader. PLEASE, if anybody is listening, don't get rid of this product! I love it!

I am deep into Google, I have 200GB of pictures on their servers I buy ads and all, I use G+ even though I really don't see any benefit but if Google Reader goes I'll have to reconsider my relationship with Google it is the first thing I check in the morning and the last one I check in the evening, it cannot be discontinued.

Well i am using Feedly as my primary RSS reader (News reader). It have all the ingredients for a modarn day RSS reader. Best part i like about it is that it will sync with Google Reader. So in my case it is still powered by Google Reader. And i ♥ Google Reader. So Dont stop the work.

I love Google Reader too and use it daily.I cant understand why Google spoiling its own services and than disabling them.I remember when Google made nobody knows what with Google Notebook by merging it with Bookmarks and than killed it. But I know many users which used this web application, and I used it too. Google Documents is not Notebook alternative like Word is not alternative of Notepad, these are applications of different types developed for different tasks.Thus first Google spoiled Google Reader with G+ remix and than can disable it like iGoogle.

Google should consider that the users of Google Reader are as power users likely the ones that advocate Google products to many others. Kill the reader and you will lose at least a few advocates to other competitor products. I for one would be pretty sad if they cancel it. It is my single most used app besides GMail and I would miss it dearly. It would be simply the wrong signal.

It always baffles me when I learn that a good RSS reader, or podcast catcher, isn't popular. Am I living in the stone ages because RSS and podcast are how I consume 90% of the information I get? And I just assume everyone else does the same.

Reader is my homepage & the way I consume most of my internet content. But given the dumb things I've seen lately I wouldn't be surprised to see them chop it.

The thing is that "social" can't replace reader. You have to start somewhere & reader makes your collection of feeds into your internet neighbourhood. Without that I'd miss a load of stuff. Visiting sites by hand is just too time consuming and relying on social only gets what others have flagged. My simplistic view is that social is the intersection of people's internet neighbourhoods, so it relies on things like rss, if only indirectly.﻿

Can't quite grasp why google refuse to put effort into a much loved product and instead work so hard on so many flops.I understand that google reader might not be as profitable as other ventures, but if it works and people appreciate it there will always be ways to generate revenue.

Reader is the most important google service for me. It is also the only tab I rarely close if my laptop is running. I've tried google plus for same purpose but the experience was not as good as reader.

While I normally don't comment much on anything but I would like to give my two cents. Google Reader is a good web app and I would miss it if it left but I know it would suddenly drop because of Google. So I local cache of RSS feeds in Outlook which works fine.I just won't have the convenience of what I read and not read online.

Oh well. I am just glad I am not heavily invested in Google. Another thing I cannot accept is the dropping of EAS which I use Outlook and Exchange heavily.

I suggest people to grab the RSS feeds and save them in document for you to enter into a new web or Desktop RSS app in case of Reader being chopped.

One more vote for Google Reader. My experience with product shutdowns/off is that there is decent window of time for pulling out content. In general, Google is great about making "my data" easily transportable. For example, see Google Data Liberation Front at http://www.dataliberation.org/

I depend on Reader as my daily newspaper. I found it by accident and now don't know what I will do without it. I guess I'll need to start looking for a replacement; and I'll also be using Google much less.